Category Archives: Wordpress

I am using the Pods Framework to developing a Content Management System (CMS) for a client. With Pods Framework plugin installed in WordPress, it’s possible to create Custom Content Types and Custom Fields. Usually this involves writing the PHP that you need by hand. With Pods, you can create all of the Custom Content Types and Custom Fields that you need from within the Pods plugin.

While developing the CMS I ran into a small issue. WordPress automatically displays ‘Enter title here’ text in the title field of any Post or Custom Content Types. When you create a new Post or Custom Content Type Pods does not correct this text to suit the Custom Content Type. Which is fine when the new Post is a Post. However lets say you are creating a CMS for a site storing customer information and the title field is being used for the Customers name then the ‘Enter title here’ is less useful and could be confusing to some.

I searched the internet looking for a solution to this problem. There were several approaches but where they all fell down was that they relied on a if/then statement for each Post, Page, or Custom Content Type. Which in its self is not a problem however every time you add a new Custom Content Type you have to add a new if/then statement. What I wanted was the replacement text to be created dynamically so that the function worked in all cases. So I wrote a function that will do exactly that.

The best part is all you have to do is copy the text below and past it in to the functions.php file of your child theme and it is done. From then on the ‘Enter title here’ text will be dynamically replaced through WordPress with something like ‘Add New Customer Here’

Recently I started using Jetpack for amongst other things the Publicize feature. Publicize
automatically share your site’s posts on a range of social media networks when you publish a new post. The time this saves makes Jetpack a worth while plugin on its own. Not to mention all of the other features you get when you install Jetpack.

After I installed and configured Jetpack to connect to wordpress.com and Publicize to my social media sites I published a Post and sure enough a post was sent to my social media sites. The next post which was after an update of Jetpack was not so successful. The post on my blog was fine but no publicization of my article to my social media sites. So commenced the reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, reading…

3. Check your XMLRPC file. You can do this by going to your web site URL and adding “/xmlrpc.php” to the end (without the quotes). When it loads in your browser, you should see “XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only.” on a line by itself.

If you see this message, but it is not on a line by itself, a theme or plugin is displaying extra characters when it shouldn’t. See points 1 and 2 above for debugging steps.If you get an 404 Error Not Found message, contact your web host. They may have security in place that is blocking XMLRPC.

4. Check the Known Issues list and make sure you aren’t using a plugin or theme listed there.

I ran the test for my self. I simply went to my home page and added “/xmlrpc.php” to the end of the URL in the address bar of my browser window (without the quotes) and sure enough I got a 404 error page, not the “XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only.” on a line by itself. So I clicked the Known Issues list link and the words Better WP Security immediately jumped off the page because I have the Better WP Security plugin installed. The Known Issues page states;

Known Issues

Known Issues
WordFence, Better WP Security, Login Security Solution

These plugins block access to your site’s XML-RPC file. This file is used by Jetpack to connect to WordPress.com, and must be accessible at all times. You will consequently need to deactivate these plugins to be able to use Jetpack.

My first thought was “I am not going to deactivate a plugin that provides the amount of security that Better WP Security provides with out first running some tests”. I then went over to my wordpress dashboard and the Better WP Security plugin and had a good look around. I had not had a look at the Better WP Security plugin for a while and did not remember all of its features.

Quite quickly I found what I was looking for on the Tweaks screen which ststes;

Remove EditURI header

Remove EditURI header

Removes the RSD (Really Simple Discovery) header. If you don’t integrate your blog with external XML-RPC services such as Flickr then the “RSD” function is pretty much useless to you.

Warning: This feature is known to cause conflicts with some 3rd party application and services that may want to interact with WordPress.

I uncheck the checkbox and clicked Save Changes. Then I ran the “/xmlrpc.php” test again. This time it was successful I got “XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only.” on a line by itself.

Now to test if my posts are once again being published on social media networks I will post this Article but if it does not work I will continue searching for the answer and post it here as an addition to this post.

well this means that during the last save your .htaccess file has become corrupt. There are a plethora of reasons why the .htaccess can become corrupt for example the .htaccess above was corrupted when my internet connection dropped out for a few seconds while the file was being written.

So how to fix this problem. You could try correcting the problem lines. If you know what the correct lines should look like. If you don’t know what the corrupted lines should look like you can delete the corrupted .htaccess file all together. Then in the wordpress dashboard open either a post or a page and save it, you don’t even need to make any changes and your .htaccess file will be re written. Simple huh?

When I switch between the visual and html editor the layout of the code in html editor goes to one line of code. If I switch back to the visual editor and then back to the html editor the layout is corrected.

Posted by Josh

I haven’t heard of this issue before. You might want to try the typical plugin routine to make sure it is not a plugin conflict.

Posted by allanit

Hi Josh

Turning off all the other plugins made this problem intermittent 🙁 Sorry I know this makes it worse.

AllanIT

Posted by Josh

Lol… yes, it does 😉

Let’s see…

Other than the options you have set for the buttons group one and the buttons group 2… go ahead and make sure all other options are NOT selected. This includes the options in the admin settings and the miscellaneous features.

Perhaps one of those options in the settings panel is interfering??

Posted by allanit

Hi Josh

I finally found time today to address the problem at the beginning of this thread. But something in the last two updates has fixed the problem in the Pages editor but not in the Posts editor.

AllanIT

Posted by josh

Hello Allan,

Okay. Let’s knock this out!

Can you post a link to a screenshot of the two instances you describe. One of the code in the pages… and another of the code in the posts.

Over the past several months I have been reading as many articles on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as I could get my hands on. There are many differing opinions out there on the best way to achieve good SEO. I am going to share my most important findings in this article.

Writing rich content will improve your SEO.

The most important SEO strategy that I found was either not in most of the articles or, in a list of 10 things to improve your SEO was at number 6 to 8 and barely rated a mention. Very few articles cover any aspect of writing the content of your post or page so that it is SEO compliant and keyword rich. Without good content the rest of the SEO is useless or leads to people taking up bad practices to attempt to achieve their desired SEO outcome.

Write for human readers.

When writing the content for your web pages or blog posts, just cover one or two related subjects in an article. Too many topics will confuse your readers. Keep your writing to the point and try not to stray off on some tangent. Write your page or post for a human reader and not for what you think a search engine is looking for in SEO because you will probably be wrong. Try to present your concepts simply so that you will appeal to a larger readership. You never know who is reading your work.

Many of the articles I read spoke about the importance of making your articles keyword rich on the one hand and how, if you are stuffing your pages and posts with too many keywords, your page ranking (PR) would likely fall on the other. My advice would be to forget about search engine optimisation altogether while you are writing your articles.

Write your post or page for the content, as thought you need to pass on information to someone who is on the other side of the planet and their only way of communicating with you is through the information you put on your website. Which in most cases is the truth.

Hone and polish your work.

Whether you are writing content for a page or a post, always write in a wordprocessor and run both spellchecker and grammar checker on your work regularly. Not all grammar checker suggestions will be relevant, however grammar checker can help you to polish your article. Don’t be in a rush to write and post your article. Spend a bit of time honing your content so that it is informative. Remember, you want to provide the other person enough information to get your point across. Also, don’t make your article so long that no one would ever finish it. Give your article a good clear conclusion. Don’t just trail off leaving your reader feeling like they have missed the point.

When you have an article that you are happy with read it out aloud to yourself. You will be surprised at how many minor mistakes you will pick up when you are reading your posts aloud. Then ask someone whose opinion you trust to proof-read your article, not just to read your writing but to read it with a critical eye, and to make suggestions that will improve your work. Consider their suggestions carefully and include any changes that improve your article.

Editing for human readability.

After you have finished your article and edited it several times, go over your work again. This time you are looking for words like “it, they, those” that you can change to more descriptive words. Change pronouns for nouns wherever you are able to and you will be on the way to improving your SEO. Be sure that the changes you make are improving the human readability of your work and not just for the sake of adding better keywords to your article. Search engines will know the difference. Never add keywords that are not relevant to your article just because you think they will improve your SEO.

All websites have to be updated from time to time. If you read the documentation they tell you to install wordpress in the root directory, which is fine if you are never going to change anything. On the other hand you should be planning for the future.

Start off by creating a folder in the root directory of your hosting package. The name of the directory is irrelevant so choose something that suits you. One word of warning, most will tell you to use something like wordpress. I, on the other hand, would use something else because you can only use it once. Choose something that when you update you can use the next one in the sequence. EG: “January”, “February” or “wordpress_2012”, “wordpress_2013”.

This directory is where you are going to install your wordpress. By setting up your wordpress in this way, in the future when you want to reconfigure your site, all you will have to do is create another folder (the next in the sequence) and install a separate wordpress in the new folder. While you are working on your site or new site you will be able to access it with the following url http://yoursite.com.au/yourfolder/wp-login.php. Of course you will replace yoursite.com.au with the url of your site and yourfolder with either of the folders your sites are in, depending which on which site you want to login to.

When you are ready to go live with your new site you will only have to change one line in the existing index.php in your root directory and update the .htaccess file and your new site will be live.

Below are the full instructions how to set up your site in this way.

1. Download and install the latest version of WordPress in a new directory on your web host plan. Eg: “yourfolder_2012”

2. Add or edit your robots.txt file in your root directory and block access to your new folder because while you are in the setup phase you don’t want search engines to crawl your site.

a. Add the following to your robots.txt file with each item on its own line.

i. User-agent: *

ii. Disallow: /yourfolder/

3. Log in to your dashboard and install the Maintenance Mode plugin

a. Search for “maintenance mode” in the plugin installer in your new wordpress site

i. WordPress> Plugins> Add New>

ii. Configure the maintenance mode plugin to block access to your new site.

b. Go to Maintenance Mode settings

i. Plugins> WP Maintenance Mode> Settings>

ii. Change Plugin Activate to “true”

iii. You can set any of the other features you want at the same time.

4. Each time you want to add content to your new site you will be able to go to

a. http://yoursite.com.au and click the link and login on the next screen or go directly to

b. http://yoursite.com.au/yourfolder/wp-login.php and login.

5. Add your content and code to your site

a. Test your site, make sure every thing is working the way you want it to.

i. When everything is working, and not before, move on to the next section.

This is a bit complicated to explain so I will tell you the steps to create the problem and see if others can recreate it and help to fix it.

1. Create a page 2. In Ultimate TinyMCE create a table 8 colums by 20 rows 3. Select colum 6 and 7 in row 4 down to row 10 so you have a box 2 colums by 7 rows 4. Then from the tables dropdown menu select merge cells. 5. Place an image 300w x 600h in the merge cells. 6. Then in row 4 select colum 1 to 4 and merge the cells 7. Repeat step 6. For rows 6, 8 and 10. 8. In row 4 colum 1 which now spans 4 colums put one word eg TinyMCE and give the merged cells a background color. 9. Then in rows 6, 8 and 10 add a paragraph of text so that in total you have more text than the image is high. 10. Then save the page and view the page in a browser.

If you get the same problem in the browser row 4 will match the height of the image. Strange huh? Any one know how to stop this from happening?

AllanIT

From Josh Lobe

Okay, I tried to replicate this… and aside from feeling like I was playing a tetris video game… I was unable to see what you are describing.

In my travels around the web I have found several ping lists that others use to notify of new posts on their blog. So I have been compiling a list that could be useful for others it includes the recommended ping list for WordPress.

Another must have ping tool you should have in your arsenal is to register with http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/ which will send out pings, RSS and podcasts.

Click the show button on the ping list below then select the entire list and copy it. Then got to your Dashboard > Setting > writing and scroll to the bottom of the page where you will find a description for Update Services. In the box below that description past the list then click the save changes button. Then the next time you post an article WordPress will automatically ping all of the address in the list.